University of Akron: We’re not Closing Multicultural Center

by Diverse Staff

The University of Akron joined a growing list of colleges and universities exercising severe fiscal belt-tightening in the new budget year when it announced this week that 213 staffers were losing their jobs. The university is attempting to offset a reported $40 million deficit.

UVa Grads Sue Rolling Stone Over Retracted Campus Rape Story

by Alan Suderman, Associated Press

Three University of Virginia graduates and members of a fraternity who were portrayed in a debunked account of a gang rape in a retracted Rolling Stone magazine story filed a lawsuit against the publication and the article’s author, court records show.

Feds Accuse Philadelphia Congressman Fattah of Corruption

by Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press

U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah paid off a campaign loan with charitable donations and federal grants, funneled campaign money to pay down his son’s student loan debt and disguised a lobbyist’s bribe as payment for a car he never sold, prosecutors said Wednesday in announcing a racketeering indictment against the congressman.

BCCC in Good Standing; Sojourner-Douglass Loses Accreditation

Diverse Docket: Race Discrimination Suit Still on Table

by Eric Freedman

Borough of Manhattan Community College and the chair of its Business Management Department must continue defending a race discrimination suit by an adjunct professor of Nigerian descent, a federal judge has ruled.

Boston College Under Investigation Over Access for Disabled

by Associated Press

Boston College has become more difficult to navigate for people with disabilities in recent years, according to former and current students whose complaints have prompted an investigation into whether the school is violating accessibility laws.

Diverse Docket: Morehead State Unanimous Winner on Appeal

by Eric Freedman

Morehead State University didn’t violate First Amendment rights or commit disability discrimination when it denied tenure to an assistant professor of art history, a unanimous federal appeals panel has ruled.

Study Links Discrimination, Blacks’ Risk of Mental Disorders

by Catherine Morris

New research shows that African Americans and Caribbean Blacks who experience multiple types of discrimination are at a much greater risk for a variety of mental disorders, such as anxiety, depression and substance abuse.

Exchange Program Expands Horizons of African-American Males

14 members of three fraternities at The Ohio State University (OSU) traveled to China last month, where they choreographed a step show for Chinese students as part of a cross-cultural awareness program funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of State.

Injured Football Player to Return to Towson University

Educators Competing With Athletics for Low-income Students’ Focus

by Lydia Lum

Workshop panelist Nathan Weigl, a doctoral student at Appalachian State University, suggested that recruiting tactics of college coaches can be borrowed and adapted by GEAR UP practitioners and community partners.

Cal State Campuses Preserving Painful Piece of U.S. History

by Lydia Lum

The archives of 15 California State University campuses are collaborating to digitize about 10,000 documents and 100-plus oral histories connected to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Manning Marable Remembered as Public Intellectual and Activist

Dr. Russell Rickford hasn’t quite been the same since learning that his mentor and friend, Dr. Manning Marable, passed away at the age of 60, after suffering from complications from pneumonia.

Marable, who was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, underwent a double lung transplant last summer, but friends thought he was on the rebound toward recovery, eager to celebrate the release of his new book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a project that took him 10 years to research and write.

A self-described Marxist, Marable had a distinguished career in the academy as a social activist and public intellectual. At the time of his death, he held the M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professorship of African American Studies at Columbia University, after serving as the founding director of the university’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies and establishing the Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia in 2002.

After writing dozens of books and publishing more than 250 scholarly articles, friends and close associates of Marable say that he was most excited about his latest book, which was released on April 4, 2011.

“He understood this was going to be his magnum opus,” says Rickford, an assistant professor of history at Dartmouth College. “It’s a remarkable book because it transforms the way we understand Malcolm and it should imbue us with a greater respect for Malcolm’s political and intellectual legacy”

Rickford first met Marable in 2002 after arriving at Columbia as a graduate student. After serving as his dissertation advisor, Marable recently entrusted Rickford to edit and publish Beyond Boundaries: The Manning Marable Reader, a major collection of his intellectual writings over the past three decades. The reader was released earlier this month.

Rickford is one of Marable’s “intellectual sons and daughters,” as he puts it. It’s a group to whom the the celebrity scholar was never too busy to provide counsel and advice.

In recent days, many of these scholars took to their Facebook and Twitter accounts to remember Marable and pay tribute to a man who helped steer so many of them into the academy. Others are planning formal academic conferences in upcoming weeks and months aimed at promoting and celebrating Marable’s contributions to the field. His 1983 classic, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America influenced a generation of scholars.

“Manning did more than encourage us,” says Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, an associate professor of political science and African-American studies at Princeton University. “He made a way for us. He cleared brush. He extended his protections. He shared his resources with uncompromising generosity. And he did all of this without needing to turn us into his personal collection. He very rarely took credit for our successes despite his important role in all that we were able to do.”

In an interview with Diverse, Georgetown University professor Dr. Michael Eric Dyson described Marable as a “brilliant scholar who believed scholars ought to have an activist background.”

Dyson says that Marable was committed to radical democratic principles and genuinely concerned with gender and class inequality. “Long before the term ‘public intellectual’ became the rage, Marable showed us just what engaged academics worth their salt and degrees should be up to: offering sharp analysis of the social behaviors and political practices that shape or distort our democratic heritage, while encouraging the powerless to take on the mighty with pen and protest.”

Those who have read Marable’s latest book on Malcolm X say it will likely stir up controversy, but seeks to contextualize the Black leader.

“Some people will not like it, but [Marable] was not about hero worship,” says Rickford. ”Marable loved Black folk. He loved us in all of our iterations and complexities and he would tell us about ourselves.”

A native of Dayton, Ohio, Marable graduated from Earlham College in 1971 and received a master’s degree in American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a doctorate in American history from the University of Maryland. He taught at Cornell, Fisk, Colgate, Ohio State and the University of Colorado before arriving at Columbia.

The Marable family is planning to hold a public memorial service on May 27 at a location to be announced. Marable leaves behind a wife, Dr. Leith Mullings, three children and two stepchildren.

Older Men, Minorities Report Lower Rates of Treatment for Depression LOS ANGELESOlder men, African Americans and Latinos with clinical depression reported significantly lower rates of treatment than other participants surveyed in a national study led by UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute researchers. Overall, less than one in three depressed older adults studied had received potentially effective treatment […]

Stanford Under Federal Investigation For DiscriminationSTANFORD, Calif. — Stanford University is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Labor for potential violation of federal affirmative action law and gender discrimination.The federal investigation was prompted, in part, by statements made by the university’s outgoing provost, Condoleezza Rice who has repeatedly expressed reservations about the goals and […]